


The Sou-chan Album

by Souja



Series: Crossposts [4]
Category: BIRDMEN - 田辺イエロウ | Tanabe Yellow
Genre: (certainly not me), (is good for the soul i hear), Alternate universe - only one birdman, Friendship, Gen, Is this gonna have chapters? Who knows, Lil' bit of angst, Writing practice, because I can't remember what that tag is supposed to be, crossposts, discovering a character, is good for the (sou-l), propersummaries2k18 is going swimmingly, this was written looong ago but hey
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-17
Updated: 2018-11-14
Packaged: 2019-08-19 04:57:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16527815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Souja/pseuds/Souja
Summary: October something, twenty-whatever. Four kids skip school and almost die but make it home to talk about it. The guy that saved them? Not so lucky.





	1. Chapter 1

.The Birdman.

\--

_There's no meaning in doing this. It just makes you feel better._

\--

 

It’s like dancing, that’s what it is! 

The way the Birdman flies from side to side, lunging and backing away. The video on Rei’s phone is blurry at best but–Wow. Coming close and then, at the last moment, flying out of reach again as if teasing an unseen partner. Just watching it makes her heart beat faster as her mind wanders to different things. Of flying, of dancing Birdmen.

“Rei, play it again, will you?” She asks, but her hands are already on his phone, scrubbing the video to the start. The noise he makes is of fake exasperation, to which she sticks out her tongue and adjusts the earphone nestled in her ear. The only thing she hears is the lazy whistle of the autumn breeze and idle chatter as the camera person ignores their friends. Her attention is on the birdman. 

The birdman flies up, and up, and somewhere far away, until only the slightest speck remains on the already terribly pixelated screen. She scrubs it back, once more, and again before her friend can complain about it. It doesn't matter much if he does, but tonight she’ll dream of flying and her land-locked self is greedy for every bit of sky she can get that  _doesn't_ involve reaching terminal velocity.

Falling. Falling is fundamentally different from flying, which Rei doesn't seem to get. He mandates that they might be more or less the same with a weird sort of pseudo-wisdom, but she disagrees. She doesn’t have experience to back it up, and Rei’s gone skydiving before, but a stubborn part of her is sure it has to be. One’s voluntary, after all, and something about falling makes her insides twists.

It's her last thought just before the bus veers off the street and contacts with the metal bars. Time stretches as the sound of tearing metal assaults her senses. She's barely exhaled by the time the whole world is filled with static that her mind struggles to process.

Her bag floats and Rei screams and her fingers tear into the chair in front of her. Tsubame wonders if flying is as terrifying. If it is, then, maybe they aren’t so different anyway. She wishes she could have found out before dying.

  
But.

 

The bus comes to a stop, and all that remains is the tension in her bones. Beside her, Rei gasps.

She’s sure it’s a miracle. Positive. Her body decides to celebrate by gifting her a wave of nausea and the urge to run outside which, thankfully, she obeys.

She’s halfway between revisiting her bento and thanking all eight million deities when sudden bursts of salty wind from above whip sand into her face. A familiar black speck dances, a thing that makes her stop and disappears the need to heave from her system as she moves the strands from her face.

It's familiar, fifteen times rehearsed and a million times fantised and... Wrong. Uncoordinated. With every lunge there is a moment where it…stills. A brief lapse where all movement ceases, an ebb in every lull.

But then it stills too long, and the speck grows larger and larger as it plummets to a cradle of sand and seawater.

  
–

The phone screens a sky blue.

  
_Kuma-chan says: “shopping?”_

  
_Tsu-chan says: “No can do :P got plans “_

  
_Kuma-chan says: “Birdman again? Lol you don’t give up!”_

  
_Tsu-chan says: “haha. I got a good feelin about it tho >:D”_

  
_Kuma-chan says: “lol ok if u say so. pics if u find it”_

  
Tsu-chan thinks she should have gone shopping.

  
–

  
There are two thoughts that sprint through Tsubame’s head as she sees the mass plummet to the ground. Two thoughts, twins almost, that draw her attention away from the world around her and the somehow-uncrashed bus, dulling her senses to an opaque haze and robbing her of breath. The first feels the loss of the indignant ringing that besieged her ears only seconds prior, a disconcertment urgent and frantic in nature suddenly absent in a tidal wave of fuzzy noises. The second shudders at the trepid silence that follows the sickening crunch as the birdman lays there, unmoving. Wrongness, it's stench now familiar, begins raising battalions against her senses.

  
“This…,” chokes the body beside her, with trembling dusty hair and a voice that sings entire hymns of fear, ”this is unreal.” Rei’s new mantra joins her own, venerations heralding the same disbelief.

  
The Birdman is a symbol. The rumours preach their roles as harbingers of joy and happiness – defenders of humankind. They do not speak about anything else. They do not say who protects the Birdman. Because that’s not how it works. Superheroes don’t just fall out of the sky.

  
Her eyes are trained forward, focused simultaneously on every detail, every grain of sand, every angry crash of the waves, and the abundance of absolute nothing. Anything to avoid looking at the mass that lays crumpled before her ( _them,_ she corrects absently, taking note of the other witnesses). Her feet are buried in a steaming puddle of gunk and sand, black like tar, slick like ice. Time pendulums between sudden lurches and abrupt stills. The ringing returns, enraged.

A soft hiss punctuates sudden movement, as the head-- helmet. As the helmet recedes. Dark hair shows first, then a face, sweat-drenched and grimacing. Eyes that are scrunched in a quiet battle against pain. Tsubame thinks that if not for the sweat and the mask, the birdman might even be human. 

  
And that's enough to rouse the nausea once more. Tsubame stumbles, almost falls, but catches herself on shaky legs. The rumours never said the Birdman was a boy. A wicked convulsion curls him tighter as he cradles himself, _protects_ himself. He breathes heavily, deeply, labored and rapid. His chest rises and falls like every movement is a futile battle in a losing war.

The world lurches once more as the Birdman turns to face them and he cracks an eye open with a terrible wince. His eyes are–red. His breath is shallow. His skin is slick with sweat and drained of pigment. The Birdman, _the boy_ , opens his mouth. “You’re…safe?” he asks, before another cough races through him, and he stains the shoes of the short boy from before a disturbing red.

  
Gravity steals the phone from her hands, weak and shaking, then lays it in the sand with a sound that goes unnoticed by taut nerves and a mind that chants ‘this can’t be happening’ like a desperate prayer. The light shines disrespectfully through the cracked screen, and her ClickTalk story reads: “Kuma-chan says “Found Him” with a slew of emojis and a picture of a small plushie bird-person.

 

...


	2. Falling

.Falling.  
\--  
I have never once dreamed of flying through the sky.  
\--

  
Recall: the birdman is supposed to save the day. 

He’s supposed to get the boy (boys) and the girl (girls) and completely flip their lives on their silly human heads with a wing stroke or two. He’s supposed to never take questions (because he has no answers) and continue to save the day like the weird unholy Saint he is. He’s also supposed to not-die, preferably. He was sure he'd gotten quite good at that.

And parts one and two happen as planned, but part three teeters on a wire-thin point and by extension, so does part four. It’s hard to save the day when you can barely catch your breath, apparently, weird brain-feathers and hero complexes be damned.

The rest don’t know this, of course. Humanity shields them as they remain stuck somewhere in transition between points one and two. They’re blind to the awful beastie in the sky, a spectacular sort of nightmare with swordlike stingers of bees and the thunderous reverberating wings of dragonflies. It’s a noisy thing, the kind that needs to die. Now. and has overstayed its welcome in the land of the living.

Hopefully the same can’t be said of the birdman, though he feels the faint thrumming of a shift in the universe that he cannot place. Thoughts and blood fill his head, the shrill Voices of the people he just saved still loud and obnoxious in a way that spells nausea for his still-unfocused eyes.

He is tired, damn it all. He’s so tired.

Shivers run the length of his arms while a fiery burn jolts through his stomach, cantering on a purplish bloom that hurts to touch but hurts more untended. 

(The gentle press of closed fists will shift his broken wings back to place, and the hero begs for just one last flight, for old times sakes. Death whistles at his door once more, but this time its tune sounds like pounding in his ears and the laboured wheezing of his own breath. He wonders, just a little, if this is what his Voice is like.)

He has a job, he knows. One that is his and his alone, and that will not wait for any sort of philosophical musing. One that necessitates that he stretch his crooked wings, straighten his bent back, and fly despite the spray of salt and sand in his wounds.

So he does, standing on jello limbs with his last foe in sight, dripping black from where it’s been impaled by its own, awful, razor-sharp legs. The humans are safe, he reminds himself quietly. They’re safe, and their Voices tell him so with confused fear, worried trepidation and--

Anger?

He breathes.

Yes, anger.

So comfortingly familiar that his eyes rest involuntarily on the source of the rage, the boiling incense so intense that almost makes him flinch. Dark eyes stare back, and though the order is unspoken, it rings louder than every terrible thing put together, even the cackle of the winds and the whooping shriek of the soon-to-be-dead thought-beast. It’s a wonderful sound.

His helmet hisses as it seals shut.

The birdman takes two steps, begins to fly--

 

\-- and all the while, Karasuma Eishi floats in a state of wordless flux.

He watches, frustratingly passive, as the black peels and evaporates into ash. It leaves behind skin, flushed pink and slick with sweat but unmistakably human, that disappears as the birdman flies up and out of sight. His last word is, “Ah.” To punctuate the end of a thousand racing thoughts from before the birdman stole his voice.

Or maybe he’s being swallowed up by invisible jaws of panic, a thing that afflicts him hard and heavy. Him and only him apparently, shivering in the bloody fabric of his too-thin school uniform. The rest of the world, unperturbed, continues to move, sounding with a ghostly tick-tock, like terrible little pieces of an automaton slowly beginning to rust. Strangers park cliff side, saying things he can’t understand while the wind crashes, and the water moans.

He hates it. He hates it. But he cannot move.

The quiet thrum of his heart seems loudest, a steady beat sending blood and adrenaline racing through his veins. A troublesome itch about his phone takes a stubborn first priority in his thoughts. He makes no moves to find it, his eyes trained upwards where a sluggish smudge of black drunkenly sways in the wind.

“Oh,” Eishi realizes, giving voice to the thing unsettling his bones with whispers of, “something’s wrong.” But his mind is racing, rebuking, and asking questions with trick answers, scolding him with a tightened clench about his throat when the conclusions come out wrong.

He’s rather ignorant about the whole birdman thing, but the answer to the question, “What would you do if you met the birdman?” Should not be, _“Give him first aid, I guess.”_

So he takes charge.

Just kidding.

The young boy does manage to bark out the loose-change equivalent of phonemes that sound kind of like an order or two. All the while he watches in a strange sort of trance, his eyes trained on a small puddle of gunk and hair, where cradled limbs lay minutes before, the only remaining proof that the thing that was...really was. It’s all very inconvenient, the sort of thing he’s never even pretended to think about before it so rudely intruded on his life.

Instead Eishi hovers in a legless state of disbelief, feeling simultaneously lost in endless freefall and yet anchored to place by invisible nets of frozen screams. Words abandon him to the sand and the wind, so there is no way to give shape to the bile-like thing nauseating his senses and clogging his thoughts. He is standing, he knows, with a sort of distant appraisal. He is standing, and he is not alone, and this is possibly the worst thing that has happened to him.

 

\--

 

Somewhere along the line, his mother is called.

No one speaks of the birdman.

 

...

 

**Author's Note:**

> well, this is a thing


End file.
